Monday, 6 May 2013

The recent post I did (HERE) on condensing your
story into a line or two received some interesting feedback so this follow-up
post will take a deeper look at the techniques involved in summing up the story into something short, easy to understand and yet
interesting. And the pitfalls along the way.

Bear in mind the idea isn’t to come up with
a beautifully crafted slogan that makes people want to rush out and buy the
book on the strength of the logline alone. Your job isn’t to invent bubblegum
that tastes like a three course meal. If people want to experience those
flavours they should just eat a three course meal.

This will be more about telling somebody what the
story's about, whether they be an agent or your mother.

I’m going to base my examples off the movie Jaws. This is because you will already
be familiar with the story (even if you’ve never seen it). But since you
already know the story and are aware of how successful and well-received it is
in popular culture, it’s going to be hard not to bring your preconceptions to
it.

So, if you asked me what it was about and I said,
“It’s about a big shark that eats people,” that would be enough for you to
recognise the movie. But if you’d never heard of Jaws you might say, “And?”

In many ways this is the main problem with trying
to capture a whole book in one line. You are the person who’s seen Jaws and can immediately see the story
behind the short description above. But the person you’re telling hasn’t even
heard of it. In fact the idea that fish eat people is something completely new
to them.

Whatever you come up with to describe your book,
you already know the extrapolated version that is your novel. A word or a turn
or phrase will have significance for you that it won’t have for the person
you’re telling.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

When a great
white shark terrorises Amity Island, the Police Chief combines forces with a
veteran fisherman and a marine biologist to catch the killer fish. What they
don’t realise is they’re going to need a bigger boat.

Now, that sort of sums up the movie. But the added
verve my little pitch has from the line “need a bigger boat” comes from the
fact that you already know that it’s one of the most famous lines in movie
history.

If you didn’t know that, it wouldn’t have anything
like the same effect.

Even though intellectually you get what I mean,
it’s still hard to fully accept. That bigger boat line, you might say to
yourself, could still have some impact. It sort of suggests problems ahead,
something for which they’re unprepared, but that feeling comes from an
inability to put yourself into the mind of someone who truly has no
preconceived ideas.

Without that pre-knowledge, it’s just a strange
way of saying it’s a very big fish. Meaning what? That it’s a mutant shark the
size of an oil tanker? That they set off in a rowing boat? It’s too vague to
have any real meaning.

Even now some of you are probably thinking, It’s not that vague, because to you it isn’t. To you, no matter how hard
you try to look at the line objectively, a residue of its meaning will remain.

And if it’s that hard to disassociate yourself from
an old movie that you had nothing to do with, imagine how hard it is when it’s
your story that you’ve completely immersed yourself in for months, maybe years.

When a writer tries to give their logline a bit of
pizzazz to make it stand out and be more memorable, they might use a turn of
phrase that’s cheeky or intriguing or clever. But often it will only make sense
once you’ve read the book. Which is pointless, since the whole reason to write
the logline is to entice the person to read it in the first place.

A common ‘solution’ is to try and condense the
whole story into one very long line. As though if you squeeze it all in and it’s
grammatically correct, no one can say you didn’t give them a clear idea of what
it’s about.

Police Chief
Brody’s job is to look after the people of Amity Island, a small seaside resort
where not much happens until a great white shark decides to turn the beach into
its feeding ground, but the Mayor doesn’t want to make a fuss and create panic
on July 4th weekend, the biggest (and most profitable) holiday of
the year.

The problem should be pretty clear; it just goes on
and on, and I haven’t even got to what they decide to do. Frankly, give me the
room and I’ll fill it.

What it comes down to is having to decide which is
the important part of the story that will tell people what they need to know
and focus only on that.

Easier said than done.

Police Chief
Brody wants to close the beach after a shark attack, but it’s July 4th,
the biggest weekend of the year for local businesses, and Mayor Vaughn insists the
police chief is overreacting.

Is that the crux of the story? Or:

A cop, a
marine biologist and a fisherman hunt down the great white shark that’s turned
the beaches of Amity Island into its feeding ground.

Either way, I’m going to be leaving out loads of stuff
that makes the movie great.

It can feel like you’re not doing the story
justice. And it can also be tempting to fix this with more details; then the
people who aren’t interested in one part might be won over by another.

When it comes to your own book, these feelings get
magnified to an even greater level and it can leave you paralysed.

The most likely place to start is with the inciting
incident, the moment when things change for the main character in your story
and they realise they have to deal with whatever they have to deal with.

You don’t need to fill in details and provide an
introduction. If Jody moves to a new town with her recently divorced mother and
starts to get bullied at her new school, you only need to tell us Jody’s being
bullied at school.

And if Jody reacts by trying to talk to the bully,
then the teachers, then her parent, until finally driven to desperate measures
she kidnaps her bully, you only need to mention the last bit.

Interesting problem that arises and what it leads to. That’s all.

Once you decide the angle you want to take, you
have to forsake all others. For now. You still have a whole book with all those
other good bits (and probably also the dreaded synoposis *shudder* to write),
so it’s not like those other ideas will never see the light of day.

Back to Jaws.
The story problem is that a great white shark decides to make its new home in
the waters around a beach packed full of tourists. This leads to the local
police chief having to gather a motley crew to go out and catch a killing
machine with over 300 teeth in its head.

I'll still have to fiddle around with word
selection and word order to make it sound as entertaining a proposition as
possible, but at least I now know which parts I need to use to get the story across.

Feel free to let me know how you would sum up the movie in one linein the comments.

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I thought these short sentences were very effective, too:Man created the Cylons. They created them to make life easier on the twelve colonies. And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters.

This was incredibly helpful. I hadn't thought about Jaws in that way, on summing up the movie and leaving out things I know because I've seen it. It really helped me put my book in perspective, on exactly what the central plot is, who is important, what their problem is and how they deal with it. Thanks!

Very helpful advise and I always love examples. I learn so much more and so much easier by reading examples of actual books. You always share the best advice. I need to go back and read part one of this segment. I finally got my novel down to that one sentence, before I attended a writers conference. Now I am struggling with a one page synopsis that one of the agents requested, along with my first three chapters

Oh man. I dread the synopsis just as much as I would a great white shark. But as usual you've made it less scary for me. Thanks so much for this post.I'll have to bookmark it.Nutschellwww.thewritingnut.com

This is something I particularly needed. Some great thoughts here. Honestly, I have found the most helpful thing in terms of summing up your book is having someone else help you. I just think we are often too deep into our own work, and having someone else tell us what its about helps us condense it. Great post!